Category Archives: Software & Scripts

HTML5’s localStorage API makes it possible for a web page to store 5-10MB of persistent data, much like cookies, but for more complex data—as you probably already know if you’re familiar with HTML5’s fancy new APIs. Feross Aboukhadijeh came up with an interesting and relevant proof-of-concept that’s been making its rounds on the internet: a little something called FillDisk.

Apparently Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera all have a flaw in their localStorage implementations that allow a website to use a little trick to fill your hard disk up. They allow each subdomain of an origin to have its own storage pool, so you can bypass the quota by looping around and storing data for tons of subdomains. FillDisk manages 1GB per 16 seconds on the author’s MacBook Pro. Firefox gets it right and sets the quota for the entire second-level domain.

Now Mozilla’s solution doesn’t exactly seem optimal to me. There are plenty of sites that allow users to host things on subdomains, GitHub Pages being a noteworthy example. It seems to me that a more equitable solution is to extend the partial solution Firefox implements and prompt the user to allow the pool to be enlarged when needed.

Opera made an unexpected announcement this past week, stating that they intend to discontinue using their custom Presto rendering engine in future versions of the browser. Instead, they will be using WebKit. On the same day as announcing that Opera has 300 million users,…

I use Alfred for all of my application launching, number calculating and folder-finding needs. It usually does a good job at finding what I’m looking for, though sometimes you already have an exact file path in mind and want to jump right to it.…

Starting in OS X 10.5, Apple introduced the handy Quick Look feature, which of course enables you to preview a file by tapping the spacebar. If you’re like me, you probably use it regularly for quick glances at files that you don’t really need…

The leading Twitter client for iOS just made its OS X debut on Thursday, and it has a very interesting feature. In the application’s preferences window, you can set the services that are used for URL shortening, image hosting, reading later, and so on.…

Tinycon is a neat script that manipulates the favicon of a page. Using a simple JavaScript call, you can add a little alert bubble over the icon, and change the number within. If the browser doesn’t support Canvas, it falls back to appending a…

When Apple released Safari 5.1 recently, it ignited a bit of outrage amongst its users. For whatever reason, Safari began refresh the page content of a tab whenever you switched to it. This kind of defeats the purpose of tabs, as you can’t leave…

Firefox 7 is out now, bringing with it much-welcome memory usage reductions and speed improvements. It has one annoying UI change, though: URLs in the address bar no longer have the “http://” protocol prefix. While that may be okay for casual users, it will…

Having trouble importing a large SQL dump through phpMyAdmin? This is a problem that often plagues users of shared web hosting, when they’re moving to a new host or restoring a backup. Since most shared hosting providers don’t offer shell access, you have to…

Microsoft has been showing off developer previews of Windows 8 lately, with it’s new multitouch “Metro” UI. The idea behind Metro is to have a tablet-friendly interface that boots quickly, with an option to switch into the traditional desktop interface. Metro apps, from what…